The Road
by Cerridwen7777
Summary: In which Dean follows the road. Set post-Season 5.


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_Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. In yourself right now is all the place you've got._

_-Flannery O'Connor_

I couldn't get out of Detroit quick enough. Away from the slums, from the hulks of abandoned factories, away from the blight of burned out neighborhoods. Part of me wanted to destroy it all. I could've nuked that damn town. But even after I got out of Detroit, out of Michigan even, I couldn't stop.

You know how some sharks have to keep swimming or they'll die? I kind of felt like that, like if I stopped moving I'd die. So I drove and drove, just following the road. I thought a little bit about where I should go. I could go to Bobby's, or to Stella's, maybe to Duluth. I even thought about going to Lawrence. But the road just keeps leading me and I don't know where.

I should be relieved. It's like the old days, the days before. I used to love hunting alone. It's a visceral thing, when it's You and It, stalking each other, testing each other, seeking the other's weakness. Make a feint, watch the reaction, adjust the strategy. It was a chess game played with shotguns and hellfire. And the rush I'd get when I came face to face with whatever I was chasing, well…it was right up there with the best sex I ever had. And now I've got no more responsibilities, nothing hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles. But I'm not relieved. I'm drifting, and I answer only to the road. Everything else is a blur on the periphery; everything is overpowered by the long black line that dictates my every move.

When I sleep, I have the strangest dreams. One time I dreamed of Sam, in a monocle and top hat, burning our mother with a cigar while she was strung up, spread-eagled, on a rack. Woke up screaming from that one, and it took a pint of Jack to still my shaking hands.

Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night, stretched out across the back seat of the car, and in my sleep-smeared brain, none of this ever happened. For a few seconds, Sam is in California attending toga parties and cramming for his LSATS. Dad is off god-knows-where doing god-knows-what, but he's alive, and I'm on a hunt alone. But then the cobwebs clear and I'll remember everything and it's like a stone in the pit of my stomach, and I stare up and watch moon cross the sky, watch the starlight splinter through the trees.

So I keep driving, hoping to leave the dreams behind, hoping that somehow I'll forget my suitcase full of terrible memories at a scenic outlook in Montana or a dingy rest stop in Idaho. I rented a storage locker in Chadron, Nebraska, paid a year's lease, and I unloaded all of Sam's gear, stacking it in piles that looked like crumpled bodies in the predawn light. I just couldn't have that stuff riding around in the trunk like Sam was coming back for it. Having it there was like having a ghost riding shotgun.

But the weirdest part is I don't really feel a sense of failure. I feel anger, loss, sorrow, regret. But I don't feel responsible. I didn't fulfill the one thing I spent my whole life trying to do, but for some reason I don't feel that I'd failed. Maybe it's because Sam had changed so much. Sam the Man was so different from Sam the Brother. It almost feels like I lost him a long time ago, and it wasn't my brother who fell. Sometimes when the music isn't loud enough to quiet my thoughts and the booze isn't enough to drown them, I allow myself to remember who he used to be, before everything fell to pieces. I can't do that often though, because it hurts my heart.

The road leads me. I don't make any choices, don't know where I'm going. I just follow the road. It takes me through the flat plains and the endless cornfields. It leads me across big sky country and up into the mountains, into the high passes lined with trees still blackened from the summer's fires. Sometimes I lay back across the hood of the car, staring up at the sky with all its stars, and I wonder why I never bothered to look before.

For the longest time, all I wanted was a normal life, to just walk away from hunting. And now all the ties that bound me to hunting are gone, and I just feel lost. I don't know where to begin. I've never had a home, so I have nowhere to go home to.


End file.
